when he came in I asked, “Father, what is this letter?”

His face flushed and he said, “I had kept it out of your sight.” Then he added, “Shall we send him a reply (1)?”

He wrote to the man: “Your letter has reached me, and we are well. As for the debt, it is owed to a man who is not pressing us, and as for our dependents, they are living in the grace of Allah.”

I took the reply to the intermediary who had delivered the original letter. After some time the man’s answer came back in the same wording, and my father responded to him in exactly the same way.

About a year later we mentioned the episode, and he said, “Had we accepted it, it would be gone by now.”

I was also present when Ibn al-Jarawī arrived after sunset. He said to my father, “I am a well-known man, and I have come to you at this hour with something I have set aside for you—an inheritance. I would like you to accept it.” He kept insisting, and when his urging became excessive my father stood up and went inside.

Ṣāliḥ said: I was later informed that Ibn al-Jarawī remarked, “I told him, ‘Abū ʿAbdullāh, it is three thousand dinars,’ whereupon he rose and left me.”

Ṣāliḥ continued: A man from China sent Chinese paper to a number of hadith scholars and dispatched a writing case to my father, but he returned it. A child was born to me and a friend presented me with a gift. Some months later that friend wanted to travel to Basra and said, “Will you ask Abū ʿAbdullāh to write letters of recommendation for me to the shaykhs of Basra?” I spoke to him about it and he replied, “Had he not given you that gift, I would have written for him.”

With this same chain, Ibn Abī Ḥātim reported: Aḥmad ibn Sinān narrated to us: “I was informed that Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal pawned his sandals with a baker in Yemen, hired himself out to camel drivers on the journey, and that ʿAbd al-Razzāq offered him a considerable sum of dirhams which he declined to accept.

“When Aḥmad died, Ibn Ṭāhir sent shrouds and embalming perfume, but Ṣāliḥ refused to…"